Month: December 2015

I wish that I had liked Radiance better. My relationship with Catherynne M. Valente is strained: after loving the Orphan’s Tales duology, I couldn’t finish Deathless, and, on revisiting the Orphan’s Tales, I was utterly disenchanted. In general, I find her prose overblown and her metaphors to border on the nonsensical. In Radiance, she’s toned her prose down; indeed, the prose is the best thing about this book. My other complaints remain. Her characterization, as always, is shallow; the concern with stories and their telling overwhelms any actual plot; the fragments of the novel, which is told through a variety of screenplays, diaries, and other narrative devices, never cohere into a greater whole.

The core problem is that Severin Unck, the glamorous and mysterious figure at the novel’s heart, is not nearly glamorous or mysterious enough. She appears as a child in her father’s film reels and in memories, but she has no presence on the page; indeed, she seems to disappear even when she is present. If Radiance has a plot, it is the disappearance of and search for Severin Unck. It’s a shame, then, that it’s so hard to care about whether she’s found or not. There are other characters, among them Mary Pellam, who is to become one of Severin’s mother figures; Erasmo St. John, one of Severin’s lovers; and Anchises, another of Severin’s lovers. Almost all of these characters have more page time than Severin; none of them are more interesting.

Valente has always been concerned with stories – who tells them, what they are, how they determine reality. It’s an interesting theme, but it’s one of two or three in Valente’s work; at this point, she doesn’t have much to say about it that feels new. Yes, truth is what you make of it; yes, we define ourselves with stories; yes, “careful the tale you tell/that is the spell,” to quote that other noted fantasist of our time, Stephen Sondheim. All of these things are true, but it feels as though this is the only story Valente has to tell.

This story is told through a variety of documents. This is the most successful aspect of the novel; if it is about stories, it makes sense to have our view of the characters and plot filtered through the lens of fictional storytelling. That said, the goal of a splintered narrative is to have all the splinters come together at the end, like the reverse of a glass falling. In this case, the splinters stay far apart. There’s also an implausible revelation scene that seems utterly unnecessary; it’s a loss of control rather than the dreamlike feel she seems to have been trying for. There’s also a glitzyness to the narrative: it’s almost all surface, with no emotional core.

That being said, I enjoyed reading this novel quite a bit: it’s like a dream, in that it’s very beautiful and it doesn’t quite cohere. Still, her prose is very effective and often lovely:

There is no such thing as an ending. There are no answers. We collect the pieces we can, obsessively assemble and reassemble them, searching for a picture that can only come in parts. And we cling to those parts. The parts that have been her. The parts that have been you. Your chest, your ribs, your knees. The place where her last image entered and stayed. We have tried to finish Percival’s work – to find the Grail, to ask the correct question. But in some version of the tale, Percival, too, must fail, and so must we, because the story of the Grail is one of failure and always has been.

If novels rose and fell on their prose alone, this one would certainly rise. But they don’t: I demand character and plot as well as prose, and Valente provides neither.

Last Song Before Night is a competent debut. It’s pleasant enough, and I doubt I would react the way I have to it if it hadn’t gotten reviews such as Jason Heller’s on npr.org. Heller’s extravagant praise of the plot, the characterization, and the themes addressed in the book raised my expectations, and on all three fronts I was let down. Let’s say, before we start, that Last Song Before Night is not a bad book. It’s simply not an outstanding one.

To summarize: Lin, a noblewoman who has chosen exile and disguise, wants to be a magic-working Poet, but is barred from the Academy by her gender. Rianna, a noblewoman, is in an arranged marriage to a man she is fond of but doesn’t love. Darien, a Poet, is a competitor for the position of Court Poet. Lin and Darien are drawn onto the quest for the mysterious Path by the Seer Valanir Ocune; in their way are the villainous current Court Poet and Lin’s evil brother.

The problem is, despite Heller’s comment that “Last Song Before Night is no retread,” none of it feels fresh at all. The trope of music as magic is a constant in fantasy from Tolkien onwards; Lin’s disguise as a boy is, at least, not convincing, but its antecedents are too many to name; the arranged marriage comes up far more often than it should; the villains even use “blood magic,” which is a common and tiresome shorthand for true evil.

What’s most troublesome to me, though, is the fact that women are not allowed to be Poets. It’s perfectly true that in 2015 there are many professions that default in the cultural psyche to male, and until about a week before the writing of this review, combat positions in the military, for one, were male-only. But such overt discrimination is rare in modern American society. Discrimination against women is not limited to literal bans on female members of a profession, though: take the relative dearth of women in the US Senate, or in Silicon Valley. A woman doesn’t have to face a misogynistic law to face discrimination; it’s a sign of a lack of creativity, I think, that so many fantasy authors want to tell and retell the story of the first woman to break into a male-only profession. It’s hardly an “exploration of cultural misogyny” (Heller) if the two main female characters face stereotyped, almost strawman forms of misogyny rather than the more insidious forms that modern American women face – and besides, Lin doesn’t ultimately overcome the misogyny of the society on her own, but rather is lifted to high position by the command of a more powerful man.

The characters are, for the most part, likable enough; the villains are appropriately villainous, though they’re sometimes, as when Lin’s brother tells a woman he’s seducing that he beat his sister, a little over the top. But whatever strange magic it is that makes me fall in love with a character was missing. The plot carried me along, but I was not particularly concerned with whether Lin, Darien, or Rianna accomplished their goals.

A common thread in positive reviews is praise of the prose. Unfortunately, that’s the book’s greatest failing. Myer’s prose ranges from unnoticably-all-right to clunky, and from the snatches of songs she gives us, it’s for the best that she doesn’t give us more. (Snow Queen of my heart/a dark night slowly falls/and if I lose you in shadow/I will ever sing alone.) This passage is fairly typical of the prose:

That Galicians loved money was also common knowledge, and undoubtedly how Rianna’s father had famously risen from street sweeper to become one of the most powerful men in Tamryllin.

It betrays a lack of logical progression: if love of money were the sole prerequisite for the acquisition of money, there would be far more millionaires in this world or any other. Nor are her supposedly lyrical passages better:

Light assaulted her in the vast room; from overhanging lamps with their multiple slender branches, from torches in wall sconces of decorative brass, from wineglasses reflecting light like a thousand flashes of bared teeth. Master Gelvan’s house could rightly be called a palace, its parquet floors spread with intricate Kahishian carpets, wall hangings and paintings on the walls that Lin knew were each in their way special.

The first sentence is quite lovely, with the exception of the final simile (why “bared teeth”?); but the rest of it is clumsy, especially “could rightly be called a palace,” and the final word, “special,” is a complete let-down. It’s true that not every wall hanging needs to be described, but grouping them all under the word “special” diminishes their power as a whole. I’ve read things with worse prose, by far, but it is hardly worthy of praise.

This is not, as I’ve said, a bad book. It doesn’t bear the weight of high expectations well, but if you go in looking for an adventure and a set of likable enough characters, and a fairly interesting plot, you’ll be satisfied. As a debut, however, it’s relatively strong, and I would consider borrowing her next book from the library.